Edición especial doble, incluye:. Commentary with Robert Towne and David Fincher. Water and Power: In this three-part documentary, Robert Towne visits sites along the original Los Angeles Aqueduct for the first time. He is informed of the social and environmental impacts and given insight into the major issues around the creation and ongoing operation of the aqueduct.. Chinatown: An Appreciation: Chinatown has been hailed as a perfect film. Robert Towne’s cynical labyrinth of secrets and sin, Roman Polanski at the top of his form, Jack Nicholson in all his glory, Faye Dunaway at her sexiest and most mysterious, John Huston as one of the creepiest and most unrepentant villains of all time, the great cinematography, the wonderful score, the bandage on the nose…. Chinatown: The Beginning and the End. Chinatown: Filming. Chinatown: Legacy. Theatrical Trailer

Beckett on Film was a project aimed at making film versions of all nineteen of Samuel Beckett's plays, with the exception of the early and unperformed Eleutheria. This endeavour was successfully completed, with the first films being shown in 2001.

The project was conceived by Michael Colgan, artistic director of Dublin's Gate Theatre. The films were produced by Colgan and Alan Moloney for the Irish broadcaster RTÉ, the British broadcaster Channel 4 and the Irish Film Board. Each had a different cast and director, drawn from theatre, film and other fields.

Not I (15 minutes)Neil Jordan directs Julianne Moore, the American actress who was nominated for an Oscar for her performance in his film, The End of the Affair, and lighting cameraman Roger Pratt who also received an Oscar nomination for his work on that film. "Neil filmed it in one take every time," says Moloney. "At the end of the first take the entire crew applauded, which I've never seen happen before on a film set."

Rough For Theatre I (19 minutes).Directed by another bright young Irish film-maker, Kieron J. Walsh, who is now in postproduction on the Roddy Doyle scripted romantic comedy feature, Stolen Nights (also known as When Brendan Met Trudy). It features Milo O'Shea and David Kelly.

Krapp's Last Tape (55 minutes)Atom Egoyan, the Canadian filmmaker whose many distinguished credits include Exotica, The Sweet Hereafter and Felicia's Journey, directs. Krapp is played by John Hurt, whose performance in the role earned him rave reviews when the play was staged in London recently.

What Where (12 minutes)The director is Damien O'Donnell, the young Dubliner whose first feature film, East is East, was a major critical and commercial success and recently won the BAFTA award for Best British Film of 1999. The actors are Sean McGinley and Gary Lewis, and the production designer is Tom Conroy. "Damien has made it more powerful than it's ever been on stage," says Michael Colgan. "Samuel Beckett's nephew, Edward, saw it and he thought it had more of an impact than it ever had on stage."

Footfalls (27 minutes).Susan Fitzgerald plays May, a role she has played on stage in Dublin, London and New York. The director is Walter Asmus, who was Beckett's favourite director and who has directed the play for the theatre and for German television.

Act Without Words I (22 minutes)Karel Reisz, who made Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and The French Lieutenant's Woman, directs his first film in 10 years. Man is played by the renowned mime artist, John Foley. The music is by Michael Nyman.

Happy Days (79 minutes excluding interval).The director is Patricia Rozema, the Canadian film-maker who made a remarkable début with I've Heard the Mermaids Singing and followed it with the underrated White Room. Her latest film is the radical Jane Austen adaptation, Mansfield Park. Rosaleen Linehan plays Winnie, a role she has played many times on the stage. Willie is played by Ricahrd Johnson.

Catastrophe (16 minutes)A true heavyweight production. The playwright and film-maker, David Mamet, directs a cast consisting of Harold Pinter, the playwright whose most recent acting role was in Mansfield Park; Rebecca Pidgeon, who is married to Mamet and has featured in many of his films; and the venerable John Gielgud, in what was his final acting role. "It brings together three of the great playwrights of the last century," Colgan adds. "Beckett was a great influence on Pinter, and Pinter was a great influence on Mamet." The film was shot in an old music hall in London.

Breath (45 seconds)There are no characters, just a pile of rubbish, and the director is the artist, Damien Hirst. "He's a mate of mine," says Moloney. "He got a bit nervous because he didn't want to misrepresent Beckett. A lot of the directors felt like that."

That Time (15 minutes).Charles Garrad directs Niall Buggy.

Endgame (84 minutes)Michael Gambon and David Thewlis are "extraordinary" as Hamm and Clov, says Colgan, and the cast is completed by Charles Simon and Jean Anderson, both of them 92 years old, as the two people in the dustbins. The film is directed by Conor McPherson, who scripted the Irish movie, I Went Down, and recently turned film director with Saltwater, adapted from his own stage play, This Lime Tree Bower.

Act Without Words II (9 minutes).The director is Enda Hughes, the resourceful young Armagh filmmaker who made the low-budget feature, The Eliminator, and the award-winning short film, Flying Saucer Rock'n'Roll.

A Piece of Monologue (19 minutes).Featuring the established Irish stage actor, Stephen Brennan, as Speaker, and directed by Robin Lefevre, whose many credits include the recent Gate production of A Streetcar Named Desire, which featured Frances McDormand, Liam Cunningham and Donna Dent, and the television series, Jake's Progress, written by Alan Bleasdale.

Play (16 minutes).The director is Anthony Minghella, whose film of The English Patient received nine Oscars, including best picture and best director, and whose most recent movie is the seductive Patricia Highsmith adaptation, The Talented Mr Ripley. He has assembled a remarkably strong cast comprising Juliet Stevenson, Kristin Scott Thomas and Alan Rickman. "Anthony first directed Play when he was a student," Colgan adds.

Rockaby (14 minutes).The accomplished British theatre and film director, Richard Eyre, is at the helm. The role of Woman is portrayed by Penelope Wilton.

The films of Ben Rivers (b. 1972) explore a world at the far fringe of civilization – a place of ragged, strange beauty where inventors, seers and eccentric philosophers live in zealous communion with nature. Rivers’ best known works remain his series of lyrical portrait films that intimately engage and observe lives detached from the metronomic rhythm of the working week world – the Darwinian theorist hermit in The Origin of the Species (2008), the untamed youth in Ah, Liberty! (2008), the anonymous pilgrims in The Coming Race (2005). Pointing back to the tradition of poetic ethnography that flourished in Great Britain in the 1930s and 1940s, Rivers’ films are imbued with a vivid sense of place that captures the mysterious aura of the nether regions, principally in the British Isles, that inspire his work. At the same time Rivers is also – and perhaps above all – an experimental filmmaker, an artist working within a mode of rigorously hand-crafted cinema and inventively using almost obsolete hand-processing techniques and technologies such as 16mm cinemascope. In films such as The Coming Race, Human Rites (2009), We the People and his recent longer work, Ikwig (2009), Rivers crafts exquisite and elusive imagery into wonderfully enigmatic and almost trance-like narratives that alternately engage themes of his documentary work such as the “primitive” as a misunderstood mirror image of the “civilized” and the secret rhythms that define a community.

BENJAMIN SMOKE is the highly acclaimed documentary by directors Jem Cohen (FUGAZI: INSTRUMENT) and Peter Sillen (SPEED RACER) on legendary underground musician Benjamin. BENJAMIN SMOKE follows the crooked path of this fringe-dweller, speed-freak, occasional drag-queen and all-around renegade living in the hidden Atlanta neighborhood called "Cabbagetown," and playing with his band Smoke. This moving, heart-breaking and often funny portrait premiered at the 2001 Berlin Film Festival, won the First Prize Juror's Award at the 2001 Doubletake Documentary Film Festival and had a national theatrical release by Cowboy Pictures, garnering acclaim from critics throughout the country. The DVD edition includes over forty minutes of outtakes and interviews with Benjamin, bonus live footage of Smoke, and performances of unreleased tribute songs by Cat Power and Vic Chesnutt.

This is a videotaped recording of a performance, in English translation, of two of Bertolt Brecht's largely unknown and seldom performed works, Übungstücke für Schauspieler and Practice Pieces for Actors. Brecht wrote these scenes to train actors in his own method for doing classical drama. These scenes were meant to be vigorously rehearsed but then omitted when the play was presented. The idea was to oblige the actors to embody their characters' human weaknesses. Brecht felt this would undercut any tendency on the part of the actor to adopt an "heroic" interpretation. Not surprisingly, the "human weaknesses" betray economic dependency.

This video contains the scenes for "Romeo and Juliet" and "Hamlet." Featured are Lotte Lenya, Roscoe Lee Browne, Micki Grant, Oliver Clark. Lenya and translator Michael Lebeck briefly discuss the theater of Brecht. Black and White

From 2004-2008, Mr. Plympton had an unparalleled string of hit films. Featured here are the best of this golden age, including the celebrated dog trilogy (“Guard Dog”, “Guide Dog” and “Hot Dog”) and a number of rare and seldom seen films, such as “The Fan And The Flower”, “Shuteye Hotel”, “Santa, The Fascist Years”, and a controversial experimental film “Spiral”.

SYNOPSIS:Bill Viola (b. 1951) is recognized around the world as a major figure in video art. Many believe he is the most important artist working in video today. With tapes of remarkable visual and aural beauty, poetic resonance and technical virtuosity, Viola has virtually defined the state of the art for more than three decades and has given the young tradition at least a score of its acknowledged masterpieces. There can be no serious center of film/video studies in the western world and Japan that has not exhibited his work, and his influence on his contemporaries, and the new generation of video artist in the United States in incalculable.

This collection contains four of Viola’s most acclaimed videotapes–which means they are among the most famous and widely seen works in the history of video art. These “allegories in the language of subjective perception” illustrate the broad range of invention and technique that Viola brings to bear upon his singular vision of being in the world. Each is structured around a solitary movement, moment or phenomenon through which Viola explores the nature of video, the categories of perception, the cognitive and spiritual inner life of the witness.

Compounded of many resonances, each level of meaning interwoven with myriad others, these exquisite “visual songs” give us the elegant music of the poet’s voice. They not only allow but demand repeated viewing so that their full richness and significance can unfold in the mind’s eye, transforming us as all true poetry does.

Austin, Texas. Lord's Gym was founded sixteen years ago by Richard Lord, a former professional boxer. A wide variety of people of all ages, races, ethnicities and social classes train at the gym: men, women, children, doctors, lawyers, judges, business men and women, immigrants, professional boxers and people who want to become professional boxers alongside amateurs who love the sport and teenagers who are trying to develop strength and assertiveness. The gym is an example of the American “melting pot” where people meet, talk, and train.

From 1952 until his death in 2003, Stan Brakhage created almost 400 films. Working completely outside of the mainstream, he consistently redefined cinematic art with such celebrated pieces as WINDOW WATER BABY MOVING (his first wife giving birth) and MOTHLIGHT (leaves and butterflies taped to celluloid), as well as a host of films hand-painted in shockingly brilliant color including DANTE’S QUARTET and BLACK ICE.

Juxtaposing archival footage spanning 35 years, as well as rare film excerpts and vintage and contemporary interviews with Brakhage, his friends, family, colleagues and critics, BRAKHAGE is the perfect complement to the Criterion Collection’s 'BY BRAKHAGE' DVD. Executive produced by Ron Mann (GRASS, TWIST), Jim Shedden’s stunning, bittersweet portrait explores the depth and breadth of Brakhage’s genius and the exquisite splendor of his films.

DVD Special Features

-"BRAKHAGE ON FILM"
A 1965 documentary by Arnold Gassan and Carlos Seegmiller

-BRAKHAGE EXCERPT GUIDE
Watch the Brakhage film clips included in BRAKHAGE chronologically, featuring rarities previously unavailable on DVD including THE WAY TO SHADOW GARDEN (1954) and ANTICIPATION OF THE NIGHT (1958)

Stan Brakhage (1933-2003) was possibly the most important filmmaker of the avant-garde, and one of the greatest artists of our time. From 1952, at the age of nineteen, until his death, Brakhage created more than 400 films, ranging in length from several seconds to several hours, constantly and consistently redefining cinematic art.

The film BRAKHAGE explores the depth and breadth of the filmmaker's genius, the exquisite splendor of his films, his magic personal charm, his aesthetic fellow travelers, and the influence his work has had on generations of other creators.

While touching on significant moments in Brakhage's biography, the film celebrates Brakhage's visionary genius, and explores the extraordinary artistic possibilities of cinema, a medium mostly known only for its commercial applications in the form of narratives, cartoons, documentaries, and advertising.

BRAKHAGE combines excerpts from Brakhage's films and films of other avant-garde filmmakers (eg, George Kuchar, Jonas Mekas, Willie Varela, Bruce Elder, and others); interviews with Brakhage, his friends, family, colleagues, and critics; archival footage of Brakhage spanning the past thirty-five years; and location shooting in Boulder, Colorado and New York.

BRAKHAGE is directed by Jim Shedden and produced by Alexa-Frances Shaw (who worked together on Michael Snow Up Close), and executive produced by Ron Mann (Twist, Comic Book Confidential, Imagine the Sound). An original score was composed for the film by long-time Brakhage associate and noted avant-garde composer James Tenney.

DISC 1. Tung (1966) - 5 min. One of Baillie’s sensuous tone poems, Tung is a portrait of a friend; sandy skin and flaxen hair in the early-morning light.. Mass for the Dakota Sioux (1964) - 20 min. An experimental film dedicated to the Dakota Sioux, which follows the form of the Christian Mass. A series of images of contemporary America interwoven with the ritual spiriting away of a dead Indian.. Valentin de las Sierras (1971) - 11 min. Skin, eyes, knees, horses, hair, sun, earth. Old song of Mexican hero, Valentin, sung by blind Jose Santollo Nadiso en Santa Cruz de la Soledad.. Castro Street (1966) - 11 min. - Inspired by a lesson from Erik Satie, a film in the form of a street: Castro Street, running by the Standard Oil Refinery in Richmond, California.. All My Life (1966) - 3 min. - The camera pans left across a wooden picket fence during early summer and tilts up into a brilliant blue sky as Ella Fitzgerald’s “All My Life” plays on the soundtrack.

DISC 2. Here I Am (1962) - 10 min. - Bailie, a Bay Area veteran who founded Canyon Cinema in 1960, filmed some developmentally challenged kids at a special school called the East Bay Developmental Center... Bruce Baillie’s lyrical portrait of an Oakland school for emotionally disturbed children regards the world of the classroom with open curiosity. His camera thrives on the unpredictable movement of students and fog; every new composition is a new window unto the school space. This impressionistic style realizes many small epiphanies of play and private reverie. A soundtrack of bird-song and cello only deepens the quietude. Though filmed in a style akin to cinéma-verité, Here I Am flows as a poem.. Quixote (1965) - 44 min. - The bearded figure at the beginning of Quixote resembles Walt Whitman and the great poet’s influence is palpable in Bruce Baillie’s kaleidoscopic convocation of midcentury America, an under-acknowledged masterpiece of 1960s cinema. Quixote describes a journey across the land and soul of a divided land with the same melancholic wanderlust that infused Jack Kerouac’s "On the Road" and Robert Frank’s "The Americans." Four distinct movements collect a litany of highway signs, Mexican farmhands, desert tarantulas, skyscrapers, high school basketball players, Indian reservations, old time religion, circus acrobats, antiwar demonstrators, wild horses, tycoons, supermarkets, comic books, jazz and the Vietnam War. The land is primary, though its meaning is held suspended in Baillie’s s swooning camera movements and preternatural optical effects. Praised as “the greatest American film you’ve never seen” by critic Chuck Stephens, Quixote remains an entirely unique atlas of the country’s spiritual currents.

DISC 3. Quick Billy (1971), the experience of transformation between life and death, death and birth (or rebirth) in four reels. "[Bruce] Baillie once related a dream in which he, as a doctor, had to suffer the illnesses and then die the deaths of all people," writes Kathleen Michael Connor. "Any human being willing to take on responsibilities for the deaths of others cannot harm them, and this is what the viewer instinctively knows." Film artist Bruce Baillie has committed his whole life to creating a more peaceful world through his art. One of the founders of Canyon Cinema (and, by extension, San Francisco Cinematheque), his works are in the Library of Congress and considered national treasures.

Capturing Keaton’s first steps in front of a camera this box set charts his early association with ex-Keystone Kop Roscoe ‘Fatty’ Arbuckle through to starring in, headlining, and directing his own box office smash hits. Using Chaplin’s old Hollywood studios in 1920, Keaton’s sophisticated technical inventiveness coupled with his haunted-yet-handsome ‘Stone Face’ persona, created a succession of the most timeless, classic comedy shorts ever realised. The Masters of Cinema Series is proud to present the following films in a luxurious box set, available on DVD, as well as on Blu-ray for the first time in the UK.

Disc 2:Audio commentaries by Joseph McBride on The ‘High Sign’, One Week, Convict 13That's Some Buster, a new exclusive video essay by critic and filmmaker David Cairns Life with Buster Keaton (1951, excerpt) - Keaton re-enacts Roscoe Arbuckle's "Salomé dance", first performed in The Cook

Disc 3:Audio commentaries by Joseph McBride on The Playhouse and The Boat

Disc 4:Newly discovered version of The Blacksmith containing four minutes of previously unseen footage Audio commentary by Joseph McBride on CopsAlternate ending for My Wife’s Relations The Art of Buster Keaton, actor Pierre Étaix discusses Keaton’s style Audio recording of Keaton at a party in 1962

Thirty more of Brakhage’s visionary creations, from 1950s films to his final work, from 2003, curated by his wife, Marilyn Brakhage. Highlights of this collection include the war meditation 23rd Psalm Branch; hand-painted films from Persian Series; The Wonder Ring, made for a commission by Joseph Cornell; the autobiographical Scenes from Under Childhood, Section One; and the found-footage film Murder Psalm.

Working outside the mainstream, the wildly prolific, visionary Stan Brakhage made more than 350 films over a half century. Challenging all taboos in his exploration of “birth, sex, death, and the search for God,” he turned his camera on explicit lovemaking, childbirth, even autopsy. Many of his most famous works pursue the nature of vision itself and transcend the act of filming. Some, including the legendary Mothlight, were created without using a camera at all, as he pioneered the art of making images directly on film, by drawing, painting, and scratching. With these two volumes, we present the definitive Brakhage collection—fifty-six of his works, from across his career, in high-definition digital transfers.

VOLUMEONE (ONEDISC)

High-definition digital transfers of all twenty-six films, with uncompressed audio for those with sound: